You create pools of physical resources, aka, clouds, give users access to them, define resources that they can use, and give them a quota. The physical resources in question are compute, storage, and network.

You can attach Configuration Manager to do additional management such as patching, DCM, auditing, compliance, security, etc.

Host deployment:

WinPE downloads and prepares a partition

Downloads a VHD from VMM for boot to VHD

Does Plug and Play for the system

Boot the machine into OOBE

Join domain and enable Hyper-V

Reboot – and it’s now in a VMM host group

Storage Management

Uses SMI-S. Storage vendors still slow to implement.

End to end mapping = create associations between storage and VM. ID storage consumed by VM, host and cluster

Capacity management: add storage to a host or cluster through masking operations. Add capacity dring a new cluster creation

In Fabric: storage is a fabric. They’ve deployed 3 NetApp arrays via SMI-S providers. They have created 3 tiers of storage pools based on quality of disk, picked from the various arrays. In the VMM console, they create LUNs that will be used as a cluster witness disk and a CSV in a later cluster build.

2 Nodes, A and B. They are discovered in VMM, using a RunAs account. Creates a new cluster in Fabric. Adds the two hosts from the host group – must be in a single host group like in 2008/R2. Can optionally do the cluster validation tests (recommended). Assign a cluster IP. Now allocate the previous storage to the cluster. Checkbox to enable CSV in the disk selection. And that creates the cluster – some simplification of the networking story here.

Can manage Hyper-V, vSphere 4.1 (via vCenter only) and XenServer 6.0.

Demo of Cloud Creation

Create a cloud in VMs And Services. Select a host group or VMware resource pools. Select logical networks. Select LB VIP profiles. Any additional storage to allocate? You can set quota on CPU, RAM, storage, custom quota points, and VM number. You can control which type of hypervisor can be used.

Creates a new role in Settings/Security. Select from admin, read only, or self-service for a cloud. Select the clouds to assign to the role. You can override the previous quotas, e.g. for the role or for the entire role, as a subset of the cloud’s quotas. Add resources to the role, e.g. templates they can see. Then you specify actions they can do.

In App Controller, we see the delegated rights this role has, e.g. what they can deploy, how much, and what actions they can do. The Self-Service Portal is there only for backwards compatibility, it’s been deprecated.

Typically people make a few clouds, e.g. Prod and Test, and then use roles to divide up the shared pool of resources.

About This Blog

This blog serves 2 purposes. Firstly, I want to share information with other IT pros about the technologies we work with and how to solve problems we often face. I've worked with technologies from the desktop to the server, Active Directory, System Center, security and virtualisation.

Secondly, I use my blog as a notebook. There's so much to learn and remember in our jobs that it's impossible to keep up. By blogging, I have a notebook that I can access from anywhere. It has saved my proverbial many times in the past.

Waiver

Anything you do to your IT infrastructure, applications, services, computer or anything else is 100% down to your own responsibility and liability. Aidan Finn bears no responsibility or liability for anything you do. Please independently confirm anything you read on this blog before doing whatever you decide to do.